Going Beyond
by Astralis
Summary: Just because the case is over doesn't mean you don't have to keep dealing with it. Postep for 'You've Got Male', NS.


**_GOING BEYOND_**  
  
**DISCLAIMER:** They don't belong to me any more than they belong to any other fanfic writers. Funny that.  
  
**AUTHOR'S NOTE:** post-ep for _You've Got Male_. I got inspired. It makes a nice change.

* * *

Nick is more than tired when he gets home.  
  
It isn't just that physical sort of tiredness you get after a long day - night, in his case - but it's mental and emotional too, because than anything else he hates dealing with the families of victims. Oh, he knows he's good at it - nearly as good as Catherine, better certainly than Grissom and Sara - but that makes the victim real for him, it moves them out of the realm of 'dead person' and into the realm of 'person who once lived and breathed and had a life', because he can see that there are people who'll be affected by that death, people who will wake up every day and know that something is missing.  
  
He goes to the fridge and gets a beer, just one, because they're always told about the dangers of sliding into alcohol or drug addiction to cope with the stress of the job, and Nick has seen enough cops go that way to walk in the opposite direction himself. He turns on the Discovery Channel and waits, hoping for something to take his mind away from this latest case.  
  
He waits in vain.  
  
Two hours go by, and then the phone rings. It's probably his mother, ringing to make sure he's eating his vegetables and make unsubtle hints about getting a girlfriend. He contemplates not answering it, but he knows his mother and he knows she'll keep calling.  
  
It isn't his mother.  
  
"Hi!"   
  
Nick can hear the forced brightness in her tone, the sound of someone forcing herself into something she doesn't quite want to do. He would know who this is anywhere, but anyway she says her name, 'Sara', in that same forced voice.  
  
"Hey Sar," he says.  
  
"I was wondering if you, ah, wanted to do something. Sometime."  
  
If he wasn't so tired, Nick might have found this a little amusing, because there is something a little incongruous about Sara and social situations, even if it is a social situation over the phone. He knows that when she says 'sometime' she probably means now, before she loses her nerve, and he is so exhausted the last thing he wants to do is go out.  
  
Even so, he was the one (or at the least the only recent one he knew of) who'd told her she needed to get out more, and he feels partly responsible for this sudden urge of Sara's to push herself outside her comfort zone. He knows he won't sleep for a while, and he could do with a distraction. So he tells her to come over and pick up a video on her way while he orders a pizza.  
  
She is there in twenty minutes, the look on her face matching her earlier tone. She's clutching a video - _Star Wars_. Nick can't help but smile.  
  
"I can't believe you've never seen this," she says, waving it in his face.  
  
"Going to educate me, are you?"  
  
"Something like that."  
  
They decide to wait for the pizza and drop down onto the sofa. "So," Nick asks, searching for his distraction, "What brought this on?"  
  
Sara pulls her legs up and rests her chin on her knees, managing to shrug while she does so. "The case I worked with Grissom, I guess."  
  
Nick's not sure he wants to talk about work, but he did ask, and he should have known that one of the only things which features in Sara's life is work. "Go on."  
  
"Well, we had two victims, sisters, found in a highway construction area. One of them, Donna, died accidentally in a fight with her sister. Joan was killed by Donna's ex-con boyfriend, who thought she'd blame him for the murder and he'd be straight back to jail. Donna met this guy through a mail order catalogue, believe it or not, and they talked on the phone and over the internet while he was still in prison."  
  
Sara stops talking, stares at the floor, traces aimless patterns on the sofa with her hand.  
  
"And?"  
  
She shrugs again. "I don't know, really. Donna was just like me. Lived off take-out, mailing lists, avoided human contact. I - I didn't want to end up like her. I want someone to care when I die."  
  
Her last sentence is so close to what has been getting at Nick all day. Luckily the pizza arrives then and he goes to the door to collect the vegetarian pizza and pay for it, thus avoiding having to respond for the moment.  
  
"I hope I'm not in the way," she says when he comes back and begins to clear the magazines off the coffee table so he can put the pizza down.  
  
"Believe me, you're not. I'm glad you called."  
  
"Heard about your case," she says, quietly for Sara and as though she is offering something.  
  
Nick chews on his piece of pizza. It's not bad, actually, but he wouldn't mind a bit of meat on it. "I just feel sorry for the man's wife," he says, knowing that he has opened the floodgates now - there is no going back. "She's going to have to live with it for the rest of her life. Her husband killed himself for her. And I know it wouldn't make it any better for her, but she won't even get the money from the life insurance. She'll have to struggle to raise their little boy alone and one day explain why his Daddy's dead."   
  
"He must have loved them both so much," Sara says. "Enough to kill himself so they could have a better life. It's almost unfair that they can't have the insurance money."  
  
"That's what gets me. His wife's left with the knowledge that he loved her enough to die, when all that woman would have wanted was to have her husband." He takes a particularly ferocious bite of his pizza. At least Sara understands, Sara who so often appears closed-off but has more empathy than most people Nick knows.  
  
"That's a special kind of love." Sara puts her half eaten piece of pizza down and stares at the floor for several seconds, before picking it up and starting to eat again. Nick thinks of the reasons she says she came here, and he wonders just how lonely she really is. For all he knows, she relies on work and the internet for social contact. He's not sure that he remembers her ever really talking about her friends.  
  
"Sara - " he says, then stops, because he suddenly has so many things he wants to say to her, wants to ask, and he doesn't know how to put them into words or even how to say them so they sound _right._  
  
She smiles at him, her special smile which lights up her whole face and which people don't see as much as they should. Then she puts in the video and turns it on, and Nick realises, somewhat disappointed, that she has talked enough. He suddenly wants to know all about her, to know every inch of her mind and to understand what makes her who she is.   
  
Nick lets the video draw him away from himself, but he can't quite ignore Sara's presence or stop him from simply noticing her more than he ever has before. He misses the end of the movie because he has fallen asleep with his head on Sara's shoulder and so misses the way she subsides into sleep too.  
  
They wake up three hours later, suddenly, when a truck honks its' horn on the street outside. They sit up stiffly and look at each other, grinning ruefully. "I'd better go home," says Sara, trying to surreptitiously yawn and rub her eyes while attempting to look wide awake, and there's something about her at that moment that makes Nick's heart melt just a tiny bit.  
  
"Yeah," he says, having that problem again where he has so many things he wants to say. He gives her a hug instead, surprising himself, and surprising her too, but she relaxes quickly and Nick can't help wondering if he's falling for her, and whether it would be such a bad thing if he was. "You have to watch the rest of the trilogy now," she says, referring to _Star Wars.  
_  
"I know." And he's glad, because he's pretty sure she means he'll have to watch them with her. "You can't leave my education uncompleted, can you?"  
  
"No," she says softly, stepping back and looking at her feet. "I've got the other videos at home. You should come over - sometime."  
  
"I will." It's a promise he makes to them both, and as she raises her head their eyes meet, just for a second.  
  
Nick watches her leave and then he goes to bed for a couple more hours of sleep, and he isn't surprised when he dreams about Sara.   
  
That night he works with her and he can't help watching her every move, and he knows now that he is falling and that he's falling hard. They see the other two movies later in the week, and soon it becomes habit that they spend most of their spare time together. The feel of her body in his arms becomes habit too, and so does the way she tastes when he kisses her. What happens between them is never planned but seems to happen as gently and as naturally as rainfall.   
  
And one day Nick wakes up beside her and suddenly remembers that case which is now so long ago, and thinks he understands something of how much that man loved his wife, and he has a whole new respect for that almost-forgotten victim, because Nick knows he loves Sara so much that he's not sure if he could kill himself to benefit her. He understands that woman's devastation and the courage it must have taken her husband to say goodbye to her for what would be forever.  
  
Of course, he knows enough about the law that he knows it would be pointless to kill himself for Sara, but at least now he knows enough about love that he can understand people who do desperate things for love. He kisses Sara's nose and watches her sleep for a minute before burying his head against her shoulder and going back to sleep himself.  
  
**THE END**


End file.
